I’m sweeping Georgian steps for minimal wage. Every time I look at accumulation there’s less, like dreams as soon as you stop trying to remember they return. Changing routes mid-tack is a recipe for failure which I’d hate to claim. Yet measuring salt, tossing handfuls of sunflower seeds, sifting flour, rolling dough, boiling euros, dicing mortgage percentages, and roasted fantasies of cycling/sailing around the world with the wind at my back–fuck! I’ve burnt the crust.
Cigarette butts and shattered glass into cycle-lanes, the tiny street-zamboni will come with sunrise. The pastor next door will scatter ashes over the choir. The advertisements are made badly so we all subscribe. When the cousin I haven’t seen in thirty years gave me that Middleton Very Rare Bottling of Whiskey, I felt pretty poor. Here’s a box of Celebrations and nothing for the two-year old I forgot or pretended I never knew you had. The wrappers are bright.
For the record, I never planned to be the cheap cunt. Cheers.
David Morgan O’Connor is from a small village on Lake Huron. After many nomadic years, he is based in Albuquerque, where a novel and MFA progresses. His writing has appeared in; Barcelona Metropolitan, Collective Exiles, Across the Margin, Headland, Cecile’s Writers, Bohemia, Beechwood, Fiction Magazine, After the Pause, The Great American Lit Mag (Pushcart nomination) , The New Quarterly and The Guardian. Tweeting @dmoconnorwrites.